So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance

This is a short, worthwhile book. Zaid does a great job of separating romantic ideas of "immortal words" and how books and writers "ought" to be appreciated from what makes a book truly worthwhile. As a writer, I found this short book of essays relevant to my own ongoing questions about what publishing ought to do. It helped me better understand that the success of a book isn't so much about numbers of copies sold as about whether the book participates in a real conversation. Take Me With You When You Go

Gabriel Zaid's "So Many Books" is a stimulating andprovocative book for anyone interested in bookpublishing. His brief, inexpensive book can be read ina single sitting, yet its ideas will, I suspect,percolate for a long time afterwards.Books need to address small and specific readerships,and computer digitization and internet communicationtechnologies are fostering that. Thus, a renaissance ofreading is now at hand. How we think about books, Zaidargues, needs to be reoriented from emphasis onpublishing and best-sellers to emphasis on reading andthe conversation that books can stimulate. Books, Zaidargues following Socrates, are a means to somethinggreater: private and public conversation enlivening andsustaining civilization and culture.Books of paper, ink, and glue will endure long into thefuture, helped, not hindered, by new technology tobypass their current commodification by big corporateentities. (For more about that, read Jason Epstein's"The Book Business" (2001).) Already, books arerelatively cheap to produce (compared, for example, tofilms). One needs only a few thousand readers to breakeven. (Think, for example, of the impact of samizdatpublications of Soviet dissidents, of Thomas Paine's"Common Sense", and of contemporary zines.) Theseadvantageous economics, making possible publication ofniche works, should grow as print on demand technologydrives the costs lower. (The primary way this willhappen is by reducing the expense and risk assumed bypublishers and booksellers in maintaining inventory.)Zaid's approach identifies new concerns. First, abook's major cost is not the purchase price but thetime and attention required to read it. Brevity andconciseness are important, as Zaid's book itselfdemonstrates. Second, matchmaking becomes even moreimportant: books and readers must be able to find eachother.

It's largely coincidental that I read this at the turn of the old and new year, but I may just make re-reading this thoughtful little book an annual event. Both elegant and wise, "So Many Books" is not simply a defense of the book as a medium. It's also, on a larger scale, a defense of reading, of those who choose (and, as the author notes, really know *how*) to read, and of the place of reading in inter-cultural and inter-generational "conversations."Gabriel Zaid looks at the economics of the publishing industry, and also the relative merits of books over both older (oral tradition, parchment) and newer (e-books, CD-ROMs) means of storing and exchanging information. He places reader, author, and individual book within a "constellation" of books in which ideas are exchanged. And he weaves "a hairshirt for masochistic authors" by showing how few books are read, preserved, or -- frankly -- even noticed by the reading public.But most of all, Zaid shows that books are nothing less than the cornerstone of the effort to define, preserve, and expand culture. The fact that there are so many books to read shouldn't depress us but, instead, excite us and make those of us committed to reading a bit more secure in what some no doubt consider our eccentricity. This is a title I hope to return to again and again.

This beautifully written and translated book takes the reader down surprising paths, and delights on every page. A mature, serious, and erudite thinker, Zaid smoothly meshes his ideas about the purpose of books and of reading with a fresh and clear-eyed understanding of the business of producing books. This is a book you will want to share. Too bad more of his work has not been translated.